Search Results for: Spin

The Marines’ Breast Cancer Epidemic

Longreads Pick

A group of Marines discover they have breast cancer—a diagnosis that is rare in men, and even more startling given they all had previously lived in the same area, Camp Lejeune in North Carolina:

“It all started with Mike Partain, a.k.a. Number One. A barrel-chested father of four with a goatee and a predilection for aviator sunglasses, Partain was born at Camp Lejeune, the North Carolina base where his father, a first lieutenant in the US Marine Corps, was stationed in the late 1960s. Now he lives in Tallahassee, Florida, where he makes his living as an insurance claims adjuster.

“Five years ago Partain’s wife noticed a grape-size bump next to his right nipple. ‘I thought it was from an ingrown hair or something. I blew it off,’ he recalls. But a couple of weeks later he decided to get it checked out. When his doctor ordered a mammogram, he remembers, ‘a chill went down my spine.’ Then came a sonogram: Partain watched in amazement as an image emerged on the screen looking like one of the globular star clusters he knew as an astronomy hobbyist. ‘I never even knew men could get breast cancer!’ he says.”

Source: Mother Jones
Published: May 18, 2012
Length: 18 minutes (4,541 words)

The story of a mysterious sports writer, her business partners, and an alleged plot to co-opt an NBA fan’s Facebook page:

Phillips kept up her correspondence with Ben, the 19-year-old college student and creator of the NBA Memes Facebook page. She said he could make up to as much as $1,000 per post as a contributor to her new sports-comedy site. Within 15 minutes, she had another idea: ‘Here’s something I just thought of: Instead of becoming a contributor, would you like to join our team as an editor/creator for the memes section?’

With this proposal, he could make even more money. She spelled out specifics for him: She told him that her ‘initial goal’ for the site would be 2.5 million pageviews per month, which would bring him $38,400 a year. By the fall, they’d have 7.5 million pageviews per month and he’d be making $102,000 per year. Big money for a 19-year-old college student.

“Is an ESPN Columnist Scamming People on the Internet?” — John Koblin, Deadspin

See more #longreads from Deadspin

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Texas Monthly, New York Magazine, Deadspin, Vanity Fair, Columbia Journalism Review, The New Yorker #fiction, plus a guest pick from author Aimee Phan.

What the writer learned from the premature birth of his third child:

When the baby cried, I knew it wasn’t gonna die. They had just pulled my son out of my wife and whisked him over to one of those fancy hotel pans that you put newborns in, and there was a brief moment when he said nothing, which you don’t want. You want the baby to cry. You want confirmation that the child can take air in its lungs and then blow it back out. You want the baby to cry the first time. After that, you want it to be quiet so you can get some goddamn sleep, but the first cry matters. The first cry means it’s gonna live. So it cried, and then I did. I cried and cried until it felt like my face was gonna split open. I yelled out, ‘He’s crying!’ to my wife, and after that everything was all right.

“Pain Is A Gift, And Other Notes From A Terrified Father During A Seven-Week-Premature Birth.” — Drew Magary, Deadspin

See also: “The Loneliness of the American College Transfer Student.” Feb. 17, 2011

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: The Guardian, Deadspin, Smithsonian magazine, New Yorker, Vela Mag, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Maggie Calmes.

A writer tries to figure out if he’s any smarter than he was at age 17:

Many times, I had to skip a question because I couldn’t figure out the answer, and then I got that paranoia that’s unique to someone taking a standardized test. I became fearful that I had failed to skip over the question on my answer sheet. So every five seconds, I’d double-check my sheet to make sure I didn’t fill out my answers in the wrong slots. One time I did this, and so I had to erase the answers and move them all forward. Only I had a shitty eraser, which failed to erase my mark and instead smeared the mark all over the rest of my sheet. FUCK YOU, TRICK ERASER. I HATE YOU.

“What Happens When A 35-Year-Old Man Retakes The SAT?” — Drew Magary, Deadspin

See more #longreads from Deadspin

Featured: E.’s #longreads page. See his story picks from The Village Voice, The Atlantic, Deadspin, plus more.

Twenty years ago, The Simpsons gave the Fox Network its first-ever prime-time ratings victory with an all-star baseball episode that beat out The Cosby Show and the Winter Olympics:

Aside from the logistics of recording nine separate guest roles, plot lines had to be rewritten on the fly. Jose Canseco’s scene originally called for him and Mrs. Krabappel to engage in Bull Durham-inspired extramarital shenanigans. Canseco’s wife rejected the scene, and the staff had to do a last-minute Saturday afternoon rewrite when Oakland came south on a mid-August road trip.

Instead of Lothario, Canseco got to play hero, rushing into a woman’s burning house to rescue her baby, then cat, followed by a player piano, washer, dryer, couch and recliner combo, high chair, TV, rug, kitchen table and chairs, lamp, and grandfather clock. Requesting the new sequence turned out to be the wiser move. Canseco and his wife had nearly divorced earlier that year before reconciling, and a week before “Homer at the Bat” aired, Canseco was arrested by Miami police for chasing down and ramming his wife’s BMW twice with his red Porsche at 4:30 a.m. After the chase ended, he allegedly got out of his car, came over to his wife’s driver-side window, and spit on it.

“The Making of ‘Homer at the Bat’.” — Erik Malinowski, Deadspin

See also: See also: The Making of ‘Nevermind’ (Excerpt from ‘Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge’) — Mark Yarm, MTV Hive, Sept. 19, 2011

How one night at Rupert Murdoch’s London townhouse changed the course of the phone-hacking scandal:

Red wine in hand, Rupert Murdoch chatted with guests at his London townhouse on what would be one of the most important nights to the future of his company. Gathered for cocktails were Rupert’s son James, heir apparent to the family media empire; Rebekah Brooks, the chief­executive of News Corp.’s U.K. unit; and Chase Carey, the New York-based president and chief operating officer. Joining the executives were a pair of legal heavyweights: Joel Klein, former New York City schools chancellor, and Brendan Sullivan Jr., the well-connected Washington lawyer brought into the Murdoch fold at Klein’s request.

It was May 19, 2011. The senior Murdoch had flown in two days earlier for a whirlwind of meetings with his top London executives. He had called the dinner party to hash out once and for all how to handle the phone-hacking scandal that had been hanging over the company for months and was suddenly spinning out of control.

“Dinner at Rupert’s.” — Greg Farrell, Bloomberg Businessweek

See also: “Hack Work.” — Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, Aug. 1, 2011

Dinner at Rupert’s

Longreads Pick

How one night at Rupert Murdoch’s London townhouse changed the course of the phone-hacking scandal:

“Red wine in hand, Rupert Murdoch chatted with guests at his London townhouse on what would be one of the most important nights to the future of his company. Gathered for cocktails were Rupert’s son James, heir apparent to the family media empire; Rebekah Brooks, the chief­executive of News Corp.’s U.K. unit; and Chase Carey, the New York-based president and chief operating officer. Joining the executives were a pair of legal heavyweights: Joel Klein, former New York City schools chancellor, and Brendan Sullivan Jr., the well-connected Washington lawyer brought into the Murdoch fold at Klein’s request.

“It was May 19, 2011. The senior Murdoch had flown in two days earlier for a whirlwind of meetings with his top London executives. He had called the dinner party to hash out once and for all how to handle the phone-hacking scandal that had been hanging over the company for months and was suddenly spinning out of control.”

Source: Businessweek
Published: Feb 10, 2012
Length: 8 minutes (2,201 words)